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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

This is almost always a mistake in muscle memory error than the author literally not understanding "its" vs "it's".

It's a typo. The author goes on to use "its" correctly the rest of the post.

As a grammar nazi myself, being a typo nazi annoys me. It's as useful to the discussion as getting on your case for using the U+2019 quotation mark instead of an apostrophe in your contraction of "they’re" and "it’s" in your comment.

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I think that the mistake is common because it is triggered by a language irregularity. Normally in English, 's indicates a possessive. By that logic, something that belongs to "it" should be "it's", just as something that belongs to John is "John's". But no, we spell the possessive pronoun "its".

And I've often seen autocorrect try to turn a correct "its" into an incorrect "it's" or vice versa.

Sure, I can see why people mess it up. But unless you see someone consistently mess it up (thus, confusion about how it works), it's just a typo and not worth derailing conversation.

At least grammar nazis can tell themselves that they're spreading wisdom.

> Normally in English, 's indicates a possessive.

It seems that the opposite is true. ' indicates a contraction first, and possibly a possessive iff no such contraction exists.

"John is" is not contracted to "John's", so it's confusing to have "It is" contracted to "It's".

> "John is" is not contracted to "John's"

John's not sure he agrees.

> "John is" is not contracted to "John's"

It is, actually. It's just best avoided due to confusion unless you're doing it for quoting or dialogue purposes.

https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/contracti...

Fun historical fact: "John's knife" was once a contraction of "John his knife".

No longer of course, the latter isn't grammatically correct in modern English. But that's where it comes from.

This is not true, it came from an inflectional ending in Old English. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/history-and-us... uses the example “cyning” (king) and “cyninges” (king’s). In theory the apostrophe stands for the missing e.

Goes to show I shouldn't trust something, just because it was taught to me in school...

For some reason my computer will underline both it’s and its with a red line, regardless of context.

On the plus side, it gets me to double check that I did it right. But it’s still really annoying!

There isn’t anything irregular about it, pronouns are just different from nouns. His, hers, yours, ours, theirs, its.

> It's as useful to the discussion as getting on your case for using the U+2019 quotation mark instead of an apostrophe in your contraction of "they’re" and "it’s" in your comment.

U+2019 is the preferred character to use for apostrophe according to the Unicode standard [1][2].

To stay on the point: I agree it’s annoying to be annoyed by such small, irrelevant details. I wish I could unlearn my {grammar,typo}-naziness most of the time.

[1]: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2019/index.htm [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Unicode

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